Simon's Mess » Ubuntu

Upgrading the N810 to Diablo

admin — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 21:58:59 +0000

It’s already been a couple of days since the release of Diablo, the latest edition of the OS from Nokia for the N810. And since the best knowledge base on the subject says its hot, there is no way I’m going to leave any longer without it !

Since I’m running an Ubuntu desktop, the upgrade process is slightly different, but really well explained here. on the Maemo community wiki.
You basically need to download the flasher from here, the Diablo image from here, shut down your tablet, plug it in the USB port, and then run the following command:

sudo ./flasher-3.0 -F RX-44_DIABLO_4.2008.23-14_PR_COMBINED_MR0_ARM.bin  -f -R

After that, you switch the tablet on while pressing the “switch window”button, wait a minute. And after a nice reboot, here you are finally running Diablo ! Easy isn’t it ?

After reboot, you need to setup your tablet again unless you did save all the data you had on it.
Since it was time for me to start clean again, I did only restore my settings, and a few data, but no applications or other things. When doing this, the OS may ask you if you want to erase a newer version with an older one (favicons for example). Only choices are Yes, Yes for all and No … A “No for all” choice would have been great since you obviously want to keep the newest files … Apparently I was not able to restore my bookmarks though … Too bad
The new eMail application, based on Modest which I had installed on my previous setup, is much better and faster. You can easily access your GMail accounts for examples and it works really smoothly now that it is tightly integrated with the OS.
Browsing experience is although much smoother on a first try … I guess I’ll have to play with it a little longer to get you more feedback !

Well that’s it for this first upgrade. Everything went smoothly, and the new features and OS looks promising … Now I just need to test Android and Fennec to have something brilliant to show my friends

VNC to GDM, with login … it can work !

admin — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 15:11:51 +0000

The reason for the recrudescence of Ubuntu posts on this blog was originally due to me wanting to put that free OS on a couple of old machines I had at home. For some of them it worked, for some it did not, but at one point I still had to buy a brand new machine, and this was the real key starting point in my Ubuntu experience. Only problem is that I did not expect my wife to like this move and as result have her take possession of the new hardware on the sole excuse that it works much better for her drawings/website designing hobby. That leaves me with my old machine, still running Windows XP (since some games for my little kid only work there) and me getting frustrated ! So I decided I’d made a better use of my super new hardware and have the both of us actually use the good machine, and use the old one just for it’s screen and keyboard !

I started to look for some info on the Internet, and found this first Howto about the subject. The idea is to install and configure a different Xserver than the one used by default in Ubuntu, configure GDM (the default window manager) to enable remote access as well as remote login, and finally use a simple VNC viewer on the client side to access the beauty. Unfortunately it’s only after a few tests that I discovered that it was addressing a rather old version of Ubuntu, and that Gutsy definitely needed some different configuration … But after already a few hours of work, I was on the good track.
I continued looking for info, and found the official help page for VNC, which I though would directly give me the good configuration to apply … This was to good to be true First let me say about this tutorial is that I do not really understand their server/client differentiation since all the GDM configuration actually happens on the server side … or at least that’s were I did it ! But since the first tutorial was pretty clear, I took it that on was on the right page. Anyhow this help page gave me some few extra pointers but I still could not get the connection from the client working and still got the “connection refused” message. At that point, I was really getting annoyed and close to letting everything go.
Fortunately I finally found this post which doesn’t say much, but made my day ! It helped me tuneup the last configuration problem I had ! And I was up and running with my new hardware from my old system !
With all that, you don’t know what configuration I made … Don’t worry here it comes !

First I installed xinetd via the traditional
```
sudo apt-get install xinetd
```

Then I configured the vnc service by creating a vnc file in the /etc/xinetd.d/ directory :

sudo nano /etc/xinetd.d/vnc

and adding the folowing data into it

service vnc
{
	disable = no
	socket_type = stream
	protocol = tcp
	wait = no
	user = nobody
	server = /usr/bin/Xvnc
	server_args = -inetd :1 -query ::1 -broadcast -once -fp /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc/ -securitytypes=none -desktop=Server -extension XFIXES -geometry 1152x864
}

Note that the final parameter (geometry) is actually the size of the old machine, so the one I’ll be connecting from with the VNC client.

I modified the /etc/services file to add this line:

	vnc             5901/tcp                        # VNC with GDM

I modified the gdm.conf (/etc/gdm/gdm.conf) file to have the following lines in the sections :
```
....
Greeter=/usr/lib/gdm/gdmgreeter
....
DisallowTCP=false
....
[xdmcp]
Enable=true
....
```
Finally restarting the xinetd and gdm services (sudo /etc/init.d/xinetd restart) should do the trick, but I did so many reboots, that a last one did not hurt so that’s what I did !
And after all that, I used TightVnc client to connect to my mew machine on port 5901 ( you can actually also use xxx:1 instead of xxx:5901) and I saw the beautiful GDM login screen !

It is a warrior’s road, but there is an end to it … Keep faith, and result will come boys ! That’s always what I’m telling myself when dealing with Ubuntu’s tricky configuration problems

DVD playback with Ubuntu

admin — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 16:40:40 +0000

This was one feature I never got working until just a few minutes ago, even though I tried a couple of times !
Thanks to sebz, and a shared Google Reader item, the following article explains you how to do that !
Since it is really simple, here are the two commands you need to type in a terminal to get your DVDs running :
sudo apt-get install totem-xine libxine1-ffmpeg libdvdread3 sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/install-css.sh

Right after that, insert your DVD in your drive, and you should be on the road for some classic DVD watching on your favorite free open-source OS !
For the record, I even successfully played the DVD from french comic Jean Marie Bigard, which was impossible on Windows XP !
PS: Sorry Vince, you were right, it IS simple to play DVD … Once you know the correct configuration

Changing the default language with Ubuntu

admin — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 15:04:17 +0000

On the request of a friend, here is how one can change the default language in Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10).

It is actually a pretty simple action, but no one seems to remember how it’s actually being done ! So just go in the System/Administration/Language Support. A window will open, and you can here select the languages that you want your OS to support, and which one you want to make the default one.

The actual pretty slick thing about this, is that all the applications (actually the one supported, but that’s most of them) will reflect this change. So if you made the mistake of installing Ubuntu in French and you’re wife is not happy with it … You have a two clicks exit